Revit's inability to snap or manually align annotation object have long been a frustration to those that have adopted Revit. Jordan Musset shares a little secret that he likes to use with sections for precise placement. Sections can be a little finicky in terms of being able to place them exactly where you want them. A technique to place them where you want them is as follows. If the section is to be placed exactly in the middle of the expansion joint, follow these steps. Sections will not use detail lines as a reference and it is difficult to move... Continue reading

This week Jordan Mussett tackles the issue with text labels in hosted content. There is a short list of families in Revit that you will need to host to the face of either a ceiling or a wall. A good example of this is smoke detectors. Depending on where they are, they can call for either a vertical face or a horizontal face. The problem comes in when there is a text annotation buried into the family. The one to the left below is hosted to the wall at 8'-0" off the floor, the one on the right is using... Continue reading

Have you ever rotated a Revit view on your sheet? Those pesky View Titles rotate as well. Jordan shows us how to keep them horizontal on our sheets. The problem; you rotated your view 90 degrees but you want your view title to stay horizontal. Scroll down the list of families in the project and under Annotation there will be the family View Title. Right Click on it and say Edit. In the Family Editor, save it as a new View Title so that you retain your current view title. Turn on the reference planes in the Visibility / Graphic... Continue reading

This week our own Jordan Mussett explains using the Project Base Point in Revit to export AutoCAD background drawings. Many Revit users get themselves in hot water when it comes to providing consultants and sub consultants with AutoCAD Backgrounds. In the images below, the Project Base Point does represent the 0,0 point in AutoCAD. At its simplest, Revit has a point that it doesn't tell you about. There is the Project Base Point, the Survey Point, and what I like to call the original origin. The original origin reveals itself in the following way. When the Project Base point is... Continue reading

In today's post Heather Alley takes a closer look at the 2015 enhancements for Revit content, such as parameter sorting and tool tips! Of all the new features in Revit 2015, we thought we would focus on a few that are specifically related to family creation. If you want the full list of new features for Platform, Architectural, Structural, & Mechanical check out this link: Revit 2015 new features First, there is the new ability to sort your parameters. This is probably one of the most requested features of all! We can now automatically sort our parameters alphabetically from A-Z... Continue reading

In a recent WTH moment our own Heather Alley realized it is the little things in Revit that will trip you up. As you will see here she ran into an issue with Revit where you cannot select a filled region and after choosing to Edit Boundary the sketch lines do not show up? Quite the mystery! You can see the hatch fill pattern, but you cannot pick on the hatch or get to EDIT BOUNDARY. Answer: The answer lies in VV (or VG) Visibility & Graphics. Open your Visibility/Graphics dialog box, and left click on the little plus symbol... Continue reading

Test your AutoCAD knowledge with Heather Alley. I have been teaching AutoCAD update classes a lot lately. I think it is because of Autodesk's push towards Subscription licenses, that many companies have found themselves "current" for the first time in years. Now that you own the latest version of AutoCAD 2015, do you really know the great new tools that have been added in the last 5 years? I have created a little quiz, for all those users who "know" AutoCAD, Enjoy! Do you know there is an ALIGN command? It will rotate, move, & scale, all in one command!... Continue reading

I hear from many of our students & clients, that they are unable to cleanly cut & paste text from Microsoft Word into AutoCAD & Revit, or from AutoCAD & Revit back into Word. If you have ever tried to highlight text in Word, and then just PASTE it into AutoCAD or Revit, you have probably received some surprising results. In AutoCAD, you will get non-editable raster text with a white background. In Revit, PASTE will do nothing, and it seems like the command does not work. The trick to getting vector text to PASTE correctly is to ACTIVATE A... Continue reading

Brandon Anderson shares his first hand insights to update this blog post. You can create custom property definitions for catalog part families using the Spec Editor, but these properties are not visible at the part size level within those families. For example a part family for pipe may contain sizes from 1-12", but the Spec Editor interface will not display these custom properties in the sizes tab of the catalog editor. ** It is possible with the following workflow to populate unique property values to the part sizes at the catalog level. When adding a custom property definition select "All... Continue reading

How do you keep your Plant project healthy? Below are a few suggestions from Brandon Anderson to improve/maintain a healthy project. Turn off Auto Save Auto Save's job is pretty clear. It is a user defined time interval that automatically saves a drawing. The drawback is if you have your Auto Save interval set to 5, 10, 30 minutes it is going to save no matter what you are doing on that set time. When you are working in a project that is constantly writing to its database introducing an interference to this could be possibly hazardous. IMAGINiT recommends manually... Continue reading

Brandon Anderson has been exploring the Plant/Vault integration for 2015. XREF Location I have seen this on a few forums around the web and thought I would throw this up here to show a quick reference to those who are new to the Vault/Plant integration. To reference a drawing from another project that is stored in your Vault you must have the Vault plugin installed and be logged in. You can then attach an Xref from a Vault project either from the command VLTATTACH or through the External Reference Manager. A new option gets added the External Reference Manager with... Continue reading

Do your BIM skills need a PiTStop? These online, lecture-based training sessions will address specific topics and targeted processes to help you improve your proficiency with a particular Autodesk software product. Do you need to work with Topology in Revit? Or do you need to create specialized content for Revit MEP? In less time than a Nascar pit crew these instructor-led, highly targeted training sessions will fine tune your BIM skills. Revit - Working with Topology Revit MEP - Creating MEP Families Productivity Improvement Training represents IMAGINiT's continuing efforts to offer timely relavent solutions for your business. See you in... Continue reading

You can create custom property definitions for catalog part families using the Spec Editor, but these properties are not visible at the part size level within those families. For example a part family for pipe may contain sizes from 1-12", but the Spec Editor interface will not display these custom properties in the sizes tab of the catalog editor. ** It is possible with the following workflow to populate unique property values to the part sizes at the catalog level. When adding a custom property definition select "All Part Groups' for the add property to: option and you must fill... Continue reading

It has been some time since my last post. 2012 has been extremely busy for me and with the release of the 2013 Autodesk products I haven't had much time to expound on the blog topics that have been collecting in my to do list! To quote Randy Quaid. I'm Back! A common dilemma for Revit users is how to most effectively use the documentation tools available in Revit to apply note bubbles and a schedule of those notes on their sheet views. I believe and hope to convince you that the Keynote tools in Revit can be adapted to... Continue reading

Aligning Equipment Nozzles in Plant 3D Nozzle placement on 3D equipment in Plant can present challenges when trying to align them with other equipment to optimize pipe routing. This video illustrates using an AutoCAD Line and Rotate command along with the Nozzle editing tools in Plant to easily create the desired alignment. Continue reading

Can you tell what I have been working on lately? J Plant 3D tool palettes are created and controlled through the project specifications. They are relatively easy to modify and maintain...not so for P&ID palettes. P&ID workspaces and tool palettes for all standards P&ID PIP, P&ID ISO, P&ID ISA, P&ID DIN, and P&ID JIS/ISO are available within all projects. The tools located on each palette in these workspaces are defined in the P&ID Class Definitions of the Project Properties. While many of the tools on these tool palettes can be used in any project, the P&ID Class Definitions for each... Continue reading

If you have ever upgraded a Revit project to the next version you have probably experienced some issues or inconsistencies in that project. Consider then that upgrading a Revit project template can often literally infect future Revit projects with similar performance impeding abnormalities. I have experienced this first hand with one of our own customers, which is why we prefer to migrate project template setup into a new Revit version template instead of upgrading your old templates. Autodesk's Revit Performance Technical Notes have not addressed this subject, but recently the 2012 certification testing undertaken by Autodesk VAR Technical Resources discouraged... Continue reading

Occasionally I will plug my laptop into a secondary monitor while working to provide additional screen space for all the applications that I have running. Recently I was working in AutoCAD Plant 3D while plugged into that monitor and I was moving some of the dialog boxes to that screen while I worked. As it happens I was doing some Plant 3D training recently and many of the dialog boxes were not displaying when I selected commands. At first I thought my installation had become corrupted and then I remembered that second monitor! It seems that the AutoCAD Plant 3D... Continue reading

Revit previously stored keyboard shortcut definitions in a simple text file - Keyboard Shortcuts.txt. In Revit 2012 this information is stored within the compiled program files making it slightly more difficult to standardize Revit keyboard shortcuts. This explanation can be found in the Revit Wiki Help - Migrate a keyboard shortcuts file from a previous release (Revit 2010 or later). For Revit 2010, the keyboardshortcuts.txt file resides in the Program folder of a Revit installation. For later releases, KeyboardShortcuts.xml resides in the following location (only after you make changes to your keyboard shortcuts): Windows XP: %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Autodesk\Revit\<product name and... Continue reading

The options bar displays the most commonly modified properties for objects during their placement, but does not contain all of the properties for an object that is found in the instance properties palette. The introduction of a modeless properties palette in Revit revolutionized our ability to define object properties during their placement. It has generally been accepted that you can change object properties from the options bar or the instance properties palette. The definition/modification of Room and Space object properties in Revit are an exception. If you define or modify Room or Space properties in the options bar while placing... Continue reading